There isn't anything "fair" about it; it is a blantant misuse of market share to make it harder to use a competing operating system. I do actually have a FAT32

There isn't anything "fair" about it; it is a blantant misuse of market share to make it harder to use a competing operating system. I do actually have a FAT32 partition as well that I use for transfer (the reason I'm plugging in the USB stick to begin with), I just also have an ext2 partition that Windows should ignore. I haven't used WSL yet, but if they already have code to read ext2 that makes it (slightly) worse, not better (unless you mean the WSL2 actually running a Linux kernel). Microsoft would prefer to have a monopoly on operating systems, but to the extent that isn't possible/allowed a duopoly with Apple isn't so bad due to Apple's "premium" focus and special hardware. It is clear that the first priority relating to Linux is to prevent new Linux users. While they would love to have a better reputation anyway, I doubt many people will be fooled for long.